<\/p>\n
By\u00a0Daniel Payne<\/p>\n
Mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania so far this year have been accepted at almost 30\u00a0<\/strong>times the rate predicted by historical rejection numbers, raising potential questions in a state in which Democratic challenger Joe Biden is maintaining a lead of just several\u00a0thousand votes.<\/p>\n A county-by-county review<\/a>\u00a0by Just the News of\u00a0accepted and rejected mail-in ballots throughout the state of Pennsylvania show that, when added up, the state only rejected 951 of 2,614,011 mail-in ballots this year, or a rate of 0.03%.<\/p>\n That is significantly less than the historical rate of mail-in ballot rejection, which generally hovers around 1%. For first-time mail-in voters the rate can jump as high as 3%.<\/p>\n In 2016, the state saw about\u00a0266,208 mail-in ballots; just under 1% of them, 2,534, were rejected, roughly in line with historical expectations, according to\u00a0the 2016 Election Administration and Voting Survey.<\/a><\/p>\n At that historical rate of rejection, around 26,000 mail-in ballots\u00a0would be rejected from this year’s final Pennsylvania tally. Such numbers would not have been unexpected:\u00a0Last month, for instance, the Bucks County Courier Times\u00a0estimated<\/a>\u00a0that, based on predicted vote-by-mail turnout,\u00a0around 28,000 Pennsylvanians might have had\u00a0their ballots pulled, rather than the 951 that were ultimately dumped.<\/p>\n The Pennsylvania Secretary of State’s office did not immediately respond to requests for comment via email and phone on Friday afternoon regarding the abnormally low rejection rate.<\/p>\n Mail-in ballots rejected for a variety of reasons<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n Voting by mail, unsurprisingly, has a significantly higher rejection rate than voting in person. Voters who use mail-in ballots often make errors such as miswritten forms, non-matching signatures and improper vote tabulation.<\/p>\n That number goes up for first-time mail-in voters, with rejected rates among that group sometimes reaching rates as high as 3%. Millions of Americans voted by mail for the first time during the 2020 election, largely out of concerns over the COVID-19 pandemic.<\/p>\n In Pennsylvania on Friday afternoon, the race between Democrat Joe Biden and Republican President Donald Trump was razor-thin, with nearly all the ballots counted and Biden leading by around 13,000 votes.<\/p>\n